On a sunny June morning at Soul Fire Farm in Rensselaer County, Upstate New York, tour guide Hillary Gaeta gestures toward rows of lush mint, lemon balm, and oregano, laughing as she describes the herbal wisdom of the grandmothers, mamas, and abuelas who tend gardens well into their 90s. "It's a way to pass down that knowledge," she says. For Gaeta and the two dozen others on this land tour, that knowledge is being reclaimed in real time.

Soul Fire Farm sits on several acres of former Mohican land and runs week-long immersion programs where participants spend mornings planting and harvesting alongside one another. The rest of their time is dedicated to exploring ancestral connections to farming—a curriculum particularly designed for Black, Indigenous, and people of color who have been historically separated from the land. Tuition ranges from free to $1,200, covering lodging, meals, and a week of programming that blends hands-on agriculture with cultural healing.

"A lot of folks don't realize that Black women grow the majority of the world's food, when you look at small holder farms especially in Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean," says Leah Penniman, the farm's co-founder. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, women are responsible for half of the world's food production, and between 60 and 80 percent in developing countries. That statistic reflects a lineage stretching back to pre-colonial West Africa—where for Ghana's Akan people and the Tuareg in Mali and Niger, land was passed through maternal lines—and continuing through the Middle Passage, when African women tucked seeds of okra, rice, and black-eyed peas into their hair, preserving foodways that would one day shape American agriculture.

Yet that relationship was violently fractured. After emancipation in 1865, newly freed Black families were promised the infamous "40 acres and a mule"—some 400,000 acres distributed by General William T. Sherman to formerly enslaved families across the South. Within months, President Andrew Johnson returned that land to former enslavers. Many families returned to plantations as sharecroppers. Those who managed to acquire property later faced legal manipulation and violence designed to destabilize Black land ownership.

Penniman often shares words from fellow farmer Chris Bolden Newsome: "The land was the scene of the crime." Her response, a reclamation in itself: "But the land was never the criminal."

Organizations like the Land Loss Prevention Project, under the North Carolina Black Attorneys Association, continue fighting for those who face discrimination in holding onto their property. But at Soul Fire Farm, the work is as much about healing as it is about preservation. "I believe in the healing power and potential of land connection for Black women," Penniman says. And as the United States marks its 250th anniversary alongside another celebration of Juneteenth, farmers of color across the country are tending to a relationship that should never have been broken—planting seeds for a future rooted in restoration.